With the increasing integration of technology in people’s lives, fewer people look to books as a source of entertainment. When the COVID pandemic hit, people finally turned back to books after a steady decline in the number of readers that had been lowering since the beginning of the twenty-first century. With everyone stuck at home with not much better to do, both book sales and library checkout numbers saw a massive increase, especially eBooks, considering they’re more portable and accessible; anyone could check out an eBook from the library without even leaving their homes. In the young adult setting, the creation of BookTok brought many readers back to the hobby as well and introducing new readers through this online community.
This report looks over Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels and their trends in popularity over the years, as not only is she one of my personal favorite authors, but she is one of the most prominent young adult fantasy authors right now. This report hopes to discover:
This dataset is filtered to only include the seven Grishaverse novels (Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, Ruin and Rising, Six of Crows, Crooked Kingdom, King of Scars, and Rule of Wolves).
From 2017 to 2022, Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels have been checked out a total of 20807 times. The majority of people reading these novels choose to check out the ebook format rather than checking out physical books or audiobooks. Shadow and Bone is her most popular novel both historically and presently, and during this time period, it was checked out 5865 times, while her least popular novel, Rule of Wolves, was only checked out 95 times. Her most popular series, the Grisha Trilogy, was checked out the most at a total of 4498 times.
On average, Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels are checked out 3219.452381 times per year, and when this number is split between the seven novels, each Grishaverse novel should be checked out at least 459.9217687 times. We will observe that this will not be the case, as we can infer by Rule of Wolves’s total number of checkouts; Shadow and Bone was checked out 5770 more times than Rule of Wolves during this time frame. On average, Bardugo’s novels are being checked out more in current years, and it seems as thought they will continue to see a steady growth in popularity.
Seattle Public Library collects their monthly checkout data and publishes it for the public. Some of the parameters in this data set include: title, publication date, checkout month and year, genre, creator, material type, and number of checkouts among other examples. The data is generated from a variety of sources, including: Overdrive, hoopla, Freegal, and RBDigital which provide electronic data for digital items while physical item checkout data was sourced from the Lebgrady artwork data archives from April 2005 to September 2016. Currently, physical item checkout data is collected from the Horizon ILS. This data set essentially acts as a monthly record of library checkouts, holding hundreds of thousands of checkouts over the years. In a sense, it acts as a marker of history from 2005 until the present.
At first glance, this data set is quite messy; certain parameters are formatted strangely, such as Publication Year which has around seven different potential formats that each mean different things. Many of the same books are referenced under different titles depending on the different material type. In addition, other fields have such a wide variety of different answers that it may be difficult to find trends that don’t occur over such a vast margin, such as when sorting by subjects. There are gaps in the data here and there and plenty of NA values, and given the size of the data set, there is quite a lot to sort through.
There are certain variables that would’ve been useful to track alongside what has already been collected. For example, we may be able to draw conclusions about a book’s quality or success based on the number of checkouts, but there isn’t any other statistic provided that may strengthen those assumptions such as an average rating from Goodreads or something along those lines. We have no way of knowing the demographics of the people who are checking out items, as all that is tracked is information about the items themselves, so we cannot draw any conclusions about people or culture in relation to checkouts without making inferences. Ultimately, this data set is just about library checkout data, so its scope only exists within that range.
This line chart visualizes the total number of checkouts for each of the seven books across the Grishaverse series split into their respective series: the Dregs Series (Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom), the Grisha Trilogy (Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, and Ruin and Rising), and the King of Scars Duology (King of Scars and Rule of Wolves).
The most popular series in terms of checkouts is the Grisha Trilogy, followed by the Dregs Series, and finally, the King of Scars Duology. The Grisha Trilogy is the only series that increases steadily over time, while the other two series have had periods of an increase in checkouts or a decrease in checkouts. While the Grisha Trilogy has only increased in checkout numbers over the years, this number spiked significantly in 2021, which can be possibly explained by the release of the Shadow and Bone Netflix adaptation in April of 2021.
This dataframe only tracks data from 2017 onwards, but it looks as though the Dregs Series had a decrease in checkouts from 2017 to 2019 after the second book, Crooked Kingdom, was released in 2016. However, it did see an increase in checkouts around 2019 again around the release of the first King of Scars novel and spiked in 2021, around the time of the COVID pandemic, only to decrease again in 2022.
The King of Scars Duology has the lowest number of checkouts all around, although, in 2022, it started catching up to the Dregs Series. Both of these series have a significantly lower number of checkouts in comparison to the Grisha Trilogy.
If you hover over the different bars, you can view the total number of checkouts for each novel each month.
This bar chart tracks total checkouts for each Grishaverse novel from January to December of 2021. Except for January and Feburary, where Six of Crows had the highest number of checkouts, Shadow and Bone is the most commonly checked out Grishaverse novel, while Rule of Wolves has the least number of checkouts by far. What’s most striking about this chart is the steady increase from February to April until there is a sudden spike in numbers in May, with a total of 788 checkouts between all novels compared to April’s 385 checkouts, which is 403 more checkouts.
The number of checkouts between May and December remain around the same area, with a slight decrease from May to September. October of 2021 saw the highest number of checkouts with 824 checkouts!
This pie chart displays the total number of checkouts for the Grishaverse novels as divided by respective novel. Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels were checked out a total of 20807 times between 2017 and 2022. Shadow and Bone remains the most commonly checked out Grishaverse novel, while Rule of Wolves, which was released in March of 2021, is by far the least popular, with only 95 total checkouts by the end of 2022. Six of Crows doesn’t trail too far behind Shadow and Bone, and both novels make up the majority of total checkouts. It’s difficult to determine a pattern between the different novels, since while Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows are both the first novels in their series, King of Scars is one of the less popular Grishaverse novels to check out. This could be because it’s the first novel of the third series or because it was published more recently.